Vaughn Palmer: A shared silence finally broken

VICTORIA — There was no missing the depth of emotion when New Democrat Kathy Corrigan stood in the legislature last month to explain her support for legislation to rein in sexual violence at colleges and universities.

VICTORIA — There was no missing the depth of emotion when New Democrat Kathy Corrigan stood in the legislature last month to explain her support for legislation to rein in sexual violence at colleges and universities.

“I want to tell a bit of a personal story here,” she began, and directly the 62-year-old Burnaby MLA plunged back into something that happened more than four decades ago when she was an undergrad at the University of B.C.

“One day I walked down to Tower Beach by myself, because it was a beautiful day. There was nobody else on the beach, and suddenly there was a half-naked man running toward me, masturbating and chasing me. I was 17 or 18; I’m not sure. I was absolutely terrified.

“Luckily, as I ran — I was young, an athlete and pretty fit — and he was chasing me, trying to grab me, a couple just happened to appear around the corner of the beach. I ran to them, and they looked after me, and the man ran away. I was not touched, but I was targeted, and I was a victim.”

The details were wrenching by themselves. The really telling part is what happened to Corrigan’s deportment as she told the story. You can see it right there on the Hansard video record, shortly after 2:15 on a May afternoon.

Her resolve cracks. Her voice breaks. And suddenly, inescapably, the two-term MLA, former school trustee, lawyer and all-around political tough cookie is overcome by what happened to her more than 40 years ago.

“Sorry,” Corrigan apologized, because that is what women feel compelled to do in these situations. “I didn’t know this was going to bother me. See, it stays with you for a long time.”

Recovering her composure, she added: “There are those that experience far worse. I’m not trivializing any event of sexual violence, because you don’t know how it’s going to affect an individual. I looked at myself as a very strong and independent person, and I remembered that incident for the rest of my life, because I was terrified at the moment of what might happen.”

That was May 10.

This week Premier Christy Clark supplied the disturbing personal confessional behind her decision to press for the drafting and passage of the Sexual Violence and Misconduct Policy Act.

Clark recounted being grabbed and pulled into the bushes by a stranger at age 13. Like Corrigan, she was “very scared.”

Like the NDP MLA, the Liberal premier never forgot it. Though the premier chose to tell her story in an opinion piece published in The Vancouver Sun, instead of the real time forum of the legislature, the messages overlapped.

Corrigan: “In this world that we live in, I’ll bet every single woman that is in this building, that in this room right now, my colleagues on both sides of the House. … I bet you every single woman will have stories that are similar to mine.”

Clark: “Over the last few weeks, I’ve shared this story with female friends and colleagues. Almost every single one of them also had a story. Like me, none of them had said a word. That’s why the stories of so many women who stay silent have struck me so deeply. Many of their stories are much worse; horrifying events will take years of determined effort to heal.”

Clark held off recounting her personal experience while the bill was before the house so it would not be taken as an attempt to distract public attention from other issues during the session.

Now that the bill has been enacted with all-party support, she is using the platform of the premier’s office to let women who’ve remained silent know they are not alone, and to perhaps make it easier for some to speak out.

There’s always the temptation, when a politicians does or says something, to reduce it to a play for votes, particularly with an election coming.

I did that myself on the sexual violence legislation, writing how the “relentlessly calculating” Clark had embraced a proposal originating from the Green party to undercut the NDP and soften her own image.

I missed the hints that Clark herself dropped about this initiative having a deeper purpose than mere partisanship.

Here was the premier in a media scrum on March 16, the day she put the full weight of her office behind a proposal from Green leader Andrew Weaver to compel post-secondary institutions to adopt tough policies to police and report violence, harassment and other forms of sexual misconduct.

“It is a life-changing traumatic experience and you never get over it. You might heal but you are changed forever. It shouldn’t happen. It just shouldn’t happen. This is an urgent issue and it’s something government should have addressed a long, long time ago.”

Here she was six weeks later, when the Liberals had finished translating Weaver’s draft proposal into the necessary enabling legislation: “Women need to speak out. We need to be heard. We need a space where it’s safe to talk about violence that we may have experienced, and it’s been a source of shame for far too long, for far too many women, and I think this change is the first step in helping us change that for young women.”

It stays with you a long time, as Corrigan said. And as she and Clark and far too many other women could testify, you never fully get over it.

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